Turkish Emphatic Reduplication: Foraging for Loose Ends
Jae Weller and Eric Raimy, Language Sciences
TER is partial prefixing reduplication deriving an emphatic meaning for a limited number of words. Reduplication is the initial consonant (if present) and first vowel of the base, followed by a linking consonant from the set [p m s r]. For example pembe ‘pink’ is reduplicated as pe-s-pembe‘extremely pink’. Phonological generalizations have been made to predict the linker consonant, where the linker is dissimilar to the consonants of the base. For consonant initial words, the linker consonant tends to be dissimilar, based mostly on place of articulation, to the first and second consonants of the base, and perhaps even the third and fourth consonants. For consonant initial stems, /p/ is the most common linker, followed by /s/, then /m/, then /r/ and it is claimed that vowel initial stems always take /p/.
Deeper investigation into TER reveals variability in both attested and nonce forms. One source of variation is the presence of multiple attested TER forms for a base. In our view, TER is partially lexicalized: the linking consonant is stored with the word but reduplication is a separate productive morpheme. We develop an Events, Features, and Precedence (EFP) analysis which supports the decomposition of TER into separate ‘linking consonant’ and ‘reduplication’ components.
